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Healthy Business Travel

There is a distinction to be made between the Jet Lagged and the Jet Stressed. It is the same difference between the chronic and the acute. One is acute and the other is chronic. Jet stress is in fact chronically acute. The value of this distinction alone is what separates those who fly well and those who don’t. A second valuable observation to our cause is that any time Man has conquered or thrived in an environment he has done so by taking his own environment with him. To beat jet lag in all it’s forms you and I must do the same, frequent fliers more so than others. The current conversation on the subject of flying well repeat the buzz words like body clock and melatonin too often without a change in results or progress. The conversation is long in the tooth with the same tired advice – get plenty of sleep, drink plenty of water and keep your mind active. Old wives tales and a pastiche of personal remedies exist alongside rigid scientific data. The masses of frequent fliers and business travellers are confounded and struggle to make sense of disjointed and often confusing information. Productivity, personal health, relationships and global business’s bottom line suffers.

The Most Intensive Frequent Fliers Hold The Key

I once read some good business advice which preached the value of catering to the extremes of a target audience. The notion was that if they were catered for all other demographics within that target market would be well taken care of. Frequent business fliers are representative of this extreme. An article in Wired magazine* charted the travel paths of business fliers over a year demonstrating the intensity of travel schedules of frequent fliers. The goals of business travellers to maximise productivity on the road, make the right impressions, close the deal and stay healthy bring home the urgency of the conversation at hand.

Unhealthy Flying Doesn’t Pay, What Are The Costs

The price we pay for not dealing with frequent flying challenges and it’s associated woes outweighs the benefits. The costs are measured on a personal and global business scale. You can measure it on the personal scale with the tendency towards weight gain, insomnia, tiredness, fatigue, adrenal stress, hormone irregularities, trouble conceiving and the list goes on and on. The cost to global business is measured in millions of dollars in lost productivity. A 2003 New York Times survey* estimated that heavy-duty business travellers lost about 20 per cent productivity due to trans-meridian travel. A recent AirPlus Traveller Productivity White Paper* also highlights the link between business travel and productivity.

Solutions Need An Upgrade

Over the short ascent of global business travel and globalisation many advances and efficiencies have been made in the area of civil aviation. The hardware of the trade, the planes have seen many modifications including fly by wire technology and a new generation of fuel-efficient planes to take us into the 21st century. Contrast that with the plight of the frequent business flier, healthy flying advice has remained static. There has been no respite in terms of the pressure and demands in the workplace. Global mobile working is on the increase see the Worldwide ERC website* for confirmation.

Look to Hollywood as an example of what I mean by this. A script is produced, a film is cast, locations are scouted out and the cast goes on location to shoot. Travelling to locations are incidental to the outcomes sought be it a film or a business meeting. Yet the quality of the end product can depend so much on the well-being of the participants. As globalisation makes the world smaller and calls for collaborative groups to come together in the name of a common goal over a short period of time, the need to be fully functional and productive is a conditional necessity for success.